UW Ellbogen CTL:  Instructional Computing Services

Last update 25 February, 2013; R. Hill

What's all this about plagiarism and what help can technology offer?

Instructors who assign writing projects occasionally find themselves uncomfortably suspicious of the originality of student work, and, having heard that the Internet is a rich source of plagiarized material, wonder how to search for a possible source of that work.  Many Internet sites do indeed provide self-published commentary and fiction, many provide documents as a public service by government agencies, and some have been set up to sell papers and essays outright (www.duenow.com).

The staff of the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning does not, in general, recommend the use of software to detect plagiarism, but rather recommends that students be given developmental assignments, turning in progress reports, prospectuses, drafts, and bibliographies, both to discourage plagiarism and to encourage good research and revision.  The Council of Writing Program Administrators explains this issue in a position statement (http://wpacouncil.org/positions/WPAplagiarism.pdf) that makes sense to us, and our own LeaRN program gives some suggestions in this document:  Creating Assignments that Discourage Plagiarism.

We are investigating purpose-built software to assess both its benefits in general and the features of specific products.  For the time being, we recommend

• Your own instincts and experience, as the detector of a problem.  As for the source of the material, make educated guesses about online databases of articles and books in your own discipline that your students might have copied.
• A talk with the student, as the only dependable way to find out what happened and decide what to do.
• Search engines such as Google, in hopes of finding a clearly copied source on the Web.  We also see a couple of free products that hold promise:
    SeeSources:  Paste text into the window at www.seesources.com.  Very easy and simple web service; reveals discovered sources immediately.  German developer.
    DocCop:  Sign up for the service at www.doccop.com.  Click on link in acknowledgement message, paste text, results e-mailed.  All substrings are subject of search and shown individually in results; 500-word limit.  No source given, but a click on the string results link will produce them.

For straight plagiarism detection, please note that, in our tests, in which we formulated papers that copied material from Internet sources, a simple Google search performed as well as anything else, even on variations of the text. 

Any mechanical text search is a simple tool only and should play a minor part in assessment.  We maintain that both positive matches and negative results should lead to the same step-- a conversation with the student about both the subject matter and the writing process-- and that this conversation is the only reliable indicator of what's going on, anyway.   

Some other resources that might help:

Indiana University Bloomington, "How to Recognize Plagiarism," with examples and exercises:

https://www.indiana.edu/~istd/

A suggestion from Jeff Karon, English instructor, for assignment that directly address the topic:

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Positive-Solution-for/134498/

From Caroline Eisner, professional consultant, guidance for student and instructor:

http://www.academiccoachingandwriting.org/academic-writing/resources/work-habits-to-avoid-plagiarism/

You are invited to speak to Margaret Flanigan Skinner, Director of the Ellbogen Center, for more advice.